When I woke up this morning, I was surprised by how late I slept in. I figured I’d just wake up at six and then have two hours to practice for the 听写, but oh whale. I skipped on breakfast and went straight to class, which was much harder today.
We had to learn how to do math in Chinese, and I did not understand a word she was saying. I already have issues with math in English, so you best believe I didn’t understand how to do it in Chinese. The way they word fractions and percentages is very different. It’s like saying 30 is 10% of 300, instead of writing 300/30 is 10. It makes sense once you know what’s happening, but until my language partner wrote it out for me, I wasn’t sure what was happening.
I killed that environmental section, but the section about the economics is just as bad as America’s national debt.
The drill two class was embarrassing because I miss read 节约 as 节日 somehow and ended up talking about the fourth of July rather than how to save money. Not sure how I managed that one, but here we are. The teacher still says my Chinese is good, but I think she’s just being nice at this point.
For lunch, I had another bowl of noodles, so I was happy.
Newspaper class was confusing as usual, but it got interesting towards the end. We “role played” as some of the world leaders involved in the 301 trade agreement, and the teacher said I had to be Trump. I didn’t even have to act dumb because I didn’t know what was happening; I just added a “Trump Accent” to my already bad Chinese and sold the act.
Daniel and I worked on homework together, and halfway through, Logan’s roommate came in to chat. He ended up writing a 成语 that was something along the lines of “A boyfriend calls his girlfriend and tells her: if you get here before me, wait, but if I get here before you, I’m dumping you.” That’ll be my next Instagram caption regardless of what the picture is.
I met with my language partner today. We grabbed some 包子 before heading back to my dorm to work on homework for an hour and a half. She’s a lifesaver when it comes to the newspaper stuff. While I wish she would have spoon-fed me the answers, I’m glad she didn’t. She’s actually pushing me to figure shit out on my own, and she adheres to the language policy better than me. She’ll write English translations, but she won’t say them.
After she left, I worked on my homework and the got roped into playing the Chinese version of mafia for an hour. I’m not really sure what was happening, but one of the key points of the game is to lie. I ended up lying because I really couldn’t do much else, and at some point, someone said: “Hayley’s gotta be telling the truth. She doesn’t know enough Chinese to lie.”
Roast me.
So, it was just me, and five other Chinese students. I was wechatting the other CLSers and explained that I was stuck playing mafia. It was eventful.